Endurance of the Egghead

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE (434 pp.)--Richard Hofstadter--Knopf ($6.95).

To hear some tell it, U.S. intellectuals have been under siege in the modern world as never before. They should relax, says Richard Hofstadter, a practicing intellectual himself and a Columbia University historian (The American Political Tradition, The Age of Reform). "Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: 'Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!' " Anti-intellectualism, argues Hofstadter, is part and parcel of any popular democracy.

Pushed from Politics. American anti-intellectualism began with American religion, according to Hofstadter. There has always been a conflict in Christianity between heart and mind, but in America it was resolved in favor of heart. The Puritans were genuine intellectuals who supported their religious convictions with learning. But as the homesteaders pushed westward, popular religion fell into the hands of evangelists who preached a direct communion with God: "their business was to save souls as quickly and as widely as possible." Evangelical anti-intellectualism reached its zenith in the revivalist Billy Sunday, who hated learning like hellfire. "What do I care," he scoffed, "if some little dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain Anglo-Saxon words? Jesus was no dough-faced, lick-spittle proposition. Jesus was the greatest scrapper that ever lived."

Religious anti-intellectualism spilled over into education. The self-made man and the dirt farmer alike were suspicious of knowledge that could not be put to immediate practical advantage. They considered higher education a frill. Unlike their counterparts in Europe, American men deserted teaching in droves for occupations that were considered more manly.

Intellect suffered a like fate in politics. The Founding Fathers combined intellect with power. But when John Quincy Adams was trounced by Andrew Jackson for the presidency, the rule of the intellectuals was over, and for the rest of the 19th century intellectuals and politicians went their separate ways, the intellectuals despising the politicians for their ignorance, the politicians taunting the intellectuals for being effete and impractical.

Dangerous Time. It took Theodore Roosevelt, whose virility was beyond question, to restore intellect to politics. He called upon intellectuals for help, and there began an intellectual invasion of government that culminated in the New Deal. The 1950s' reaction against the intellectuals was not so serious as intellectuals supposed. They interpreted

Adlai Stevenson's defeat as a repudiation of intellect in politics. But it was a Republican year, argues Hofstadter, and almost any Republican would have won --let alone Eisenhower, who had the added advantage of enormous personal charm. Nor were all intellectuals for Stevenson. Following the current lodge rules for intellectuals, Hofstadter seems to assume that an intellectual is necessarily a "liberal"--thereby neglecting a whole genealogy of conservative intellectuals from Alexander Hamilton through Henry Adams to Henry L. Mencken and Robert Frost.

Today, intellectuals are in government. But as a group, and as always, they are worried. Where once they resented their exclusion from power, they now fear it may corrupt them. Here Hofstadter shows real impatience with his lodge brothers. "The great intellectuals of pagan antiquity," writes Hofstadter, "the doctors of the medieval universities, the scholars of the Renaissance, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, sought a conjunction of knowledge and power and accepted its risks without optimism or naivete."

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